Media hosting services that allow users to upload multimedia content (e.g., audio/video content) for mass viewing allow easy distribution of global events regardless of demographic agenda. As volume of hosted media content continues to grow, management of ownership rights pertaining to hosted media content has become an increasingly challenging problem for hosting services. For music content embedded in an audio or video file, songwriters, publishers, and recording labels are just some of the different entities that may hold rights to the media content. For appropriate payments to be made to copyright holders, media content needs to be correctly identified. However, unlike television and radio environments where content is typically identified prior to airing, media hosting services often handle user-provided media content that may initially be unidentified. Manual identification of such media content becomes onerous when media hosting sites receive thousands or millions of new media uploads every day. Generally, most automated mechanisms require the entire content in advance. However, right holders cannot always provide the full content upfront, if, for example, in the case of a live event stream, and thus, improved mechanisms are sought after for modern media hosting services.